Cuba's Telecommunications Company takes on long-range development program for 2021

HAVANA, Cuba, Mar 4 (ACN) The Cuban Telecommunications Company (Etecsa) plans to continue working on the deployment of broadband Internet access technologies to increase connectivity levels for the institutional and residential sectors, as well as to diversify and expand its portfolio of services in the interest of higher levels of affordability from cellular telephony.

Mayra Arevich Marín, executive president of the entity, informed about its main projections for 2021, and emphasized that as part of this objective the development of combined tariffs for voice, SMS and data, and the incorporation of services such as the Virtual Server for individuals and the offer of online videoconferencing.

In addition, she referred to the purpose of increasing LTE coverage to one hundred percent of Cuban municipalities and 50 percent of popular councils - 74 percent have at least one connection possibility -, while developing connectivity projects of economic and social impact with the Ministries of Tourism, Health, Education and Higher Education.

Other priorities of Etecsa for 2021 include working to bring services even closer to the population, fostering linkages with other companies and economic players and promoting the development of e-commerce, acting as a coordinating entity between the different sectors and entities.

It is also planned to establish partnerships with application and service providers to diversify offers in the new digital environment, since the development of technological infrastructure is the company's main responsibility in terms of the informatization of society.

The Transfermovil application for mobile devices, six years after its development, will also be renewed this year, to the delight of its more than 17 thousand users, who, in addition to the 30 services currently active, will be able to pay fines, make cultural, sports and gastronomic reservations and other commercial facilities.

Arevich Marín also summarized Etecsa's results at the end of 2020, a year marked by the appearance of COVID-19 in Cuba, which made it necessary to work harder to expand coverage and access to the Internet and all its services.

She recognized in that sense the work developed by all the company's workers, who assumed the epidemiological risks of the moment and abandoned their link to the services that guarantee the vitality of many vital processes and platforms of the country.

The needs of communication and the use of electronic commerce by the population made our entity enable 619 thousand new mobile line services, and it was possible to install 4 thousand 181 3G and 4G radio bases.

It is expected to complete the 4G coverage to all the municipal capitals of the country before the end of April, he said and stressed the importance of creating more capacities according to the traffic demand.

In 2020, the nation reached the figure of 4,421,000 mobile Internet users, while 1,250,000 customers access the network through wifi points, navigation rooms or the Nauta Home service, the latter being present in 189,700 homes.

It is also a priority to sustain the connectivity of the entities responsible for the development of the country's economy, the Government, Science and Education, with which 51,100 institutional connectivity links have been created and are expected to reach 56,000.

The official also called attention to the importance of training and preparing the population in the use of these platforms and developing innovation, based on its current 22 projects; 11 of them with universities and seven with related entities.